Prince Andrew visited Nexfor‘s Cowie plant in Stirlingshire on September 8 just over three months after visiting the company’s OSB factory at Inverness.
Site director Pierre McNeil said the royal visit would highlight the work Nexfor has been doing for the benefit of the environment and the community in Cowie.
The event coincided with Nexfor’s completion of a £100m five-year capital investment programme at its South Molton, Cowie and Inverness plants.
The company has targeted nearly £60m of the total amount at environmental measures and one result is that nearly 70% of total energy demand at the three plants is now derived from biomass.
An £18m project to replace an older generation particleboard production line at Cowie is now complete. One third of the investment was to clean recycled wood fibre in order to reduce consumption of virgin fibre, save energy and improve product quality.
Cowie also saw improvements to process control and monitoring equipment enabling it to achieve record high levels of machine use while reducing scrap levels to an all time low.
Nexfor’s OSB plant in Inverness has seen a £6m refit, resulting in major improvements to both the quality and quantity of OSB produced.
